Cycle of the Werewolf Page 4

  Elmer finds what he expects in his pigpen; carnage. All nine of his sows and both of his boars are dead—disembowelled and partly eaten. They lie in the mud, the cold rain pelting down on their carcasses, their bulging eyes staring up at the cold autumn sky.

  Elmer’s brother Pete, called over from Minot, stands beside Elmer. They don’t speak for a long time, and then Elmer says what has been in Pete’s mind as well. “Insurance will cover some of it. Not all, but some. I guess I can foot the rest. Better my pigs than another person.”

  Pete nods. “There’s been enough,” he says, his voice a murmur that can barely be heard over the rain.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Next full moon there’s got to be forty men out . . . or sixty . . . or a hundred and sixty. Time folks stopped dicking around and pretending it ain’t happening, when any fool can see it is. Look here, for Christ’s sweet sake!”

  Pete points down. Around the slaughtered pigs, the soft earth of the pen is full of very large tracks. They look like the tracks of a wolf . . . but they also look weirdly human.

  “You see those fucking tracks?”

  “I see them,” Elmer allows.

  “You think Sweet Betsy from Pike made those tracks?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “Werewolf made those tracks,” Pete says, “You know it, Alice knows it, most of the people in this town know it. Hell, even I know it, and I come from the next county over.” He looks at his brother, his face dour and stern, the face of a New England Puritan from 1650. And he repeats: “There’s been enough. Time this thing was ended.”

  Elmer considers this long as the rain continues to tap on the two men’s slickers, and then he nods. “I guess. But not next full moon.”

  “You want to wait until November?”

  Elmer nods. “Bare woods. Better tracking, if we get a little snow.”

  “What about next month?”

  Elmer Zinneman looks at his slaughtered pigs in the pen beside his barn. Then he looks at his brother Pete.

  “People better look out,” he says.

  When Marty Coslaw comes home from trick or treating on Halloween Night with the batteries in his wheelchair all but dead flat, he goes directly to bed, where he lies awake until the half-moon rises in a cold sky strewn with stars like diamond chips. Outside, on the verandah where his life was saved by a string of Fourth of July firecrackers, a chill wind blows brown leaves in swirling, aimless corkscrews on the flagstones. They rattle like old bones. The October full moon has come and gone in Tarker’s Mills with no new murder, the second month in a row this has happened. Some of the townspeople—Stan Pelky, the barber, is one, and Cal Blodwin, who owns Blodwin Chevrolet, the town’s only car dealership, is another—believe that the terror is over; the killer was a drifter, or a tramp living out in the woods, and now he has moved on, just as they said he would. Others, however, are not so sure. These are the ones who do long reckoning on the four deer found slaughtered out by the turnpike the day after the October full moon, and upon Elmer Zinneman’s eleven pigs, killed at full moon time in September. The argument rages at The Pub over beers during the long autumn nights.

  But Marty Coslaw knows.

  This night he has gone out trick or treating with his father (his father likes Halloween, likes the brisk cold, likes to laugh his hearty Big Pal laugh and bellow such idiotic things as “Hey, hey!” and “Ring-dang-doo!” when the doors open and familiar Tarker’s Mills faces look out). Marty went as Yoda, a big rubber Don Post mask pulled down over his head and a voluminous robe on which covered his wasted legs. “You always get everything you want,” Katie says with a toss of her head when she sees the mask . . . but he knows she isn’t really mad at him (and as if to prove it, she makes him an artfully crooked Yoda staff to complete his getup), but perhaps sad because she is now considered too old to go out trick or treating. Instead she will go to a party with her junior high school friends. She will dance to Donna Summer records, and bob for apples, and later on the lights will be turned down for a game of spin-the-bottle and she will perhaps kiss some boy, not because she wants to but because it will be fun to giggle about it with her girlfriends in study hall the next day.

  Marty’s dad takes Marty in the van because the van has a built-in ramp he can use to get Marty in and out. Marty rolls down the ramp and then buzzes up and down the streets themselves in his chair. He carries his bag on his lap and they go to all the houses on their road and then to a few houses downtown: the Collinses’, the MacInnes’, the Manchesters’, the Millikens’, the Eastons’. There is a fishbowl full of candy corn inside The Pub. Snickers Bars at the Congregational Church parsonage and Chunky bars at the Baptist Parsonage. Then on to the Randolphs’, the Quinns’, the Dixons’, and a dozen, two dozen more. Marty comes home with his bag of candy bulging . . . and a piece of scary, almost unbelievable knowledge.

  He knows.

  He knows who the werewolf is.

  At one point on Marty’s tour, the Beast himself, now safely between its moons of insanity, has dropped candy into his bag, unaware that Marty’s face has gone deadly pale under his Don Post Yoda mask, or that, beneath his gloves, his fingers are clutching his Yoda staff so tightly that the fingernails are white. The werewolf smiles at Marty, and pats his rubber head.

  But it is the werewolf. Marty knows, and not just because the man is wearing an eyepatch. There is something else—some vital similarity in this man’s human face to the snarling face of the animal he saw on that silvery summer night almost four months ago now.

  Since returning to Tarker’s Mills from Vermont the day after Labor Day, Marty has kept a watch, sure that he will see the werewolf sooner or later, and sure that he will know him when he does because the werewolf will be a one-eyed man. Although the police nodded and said they would check it out when he told them he was pretty sure he had put out one of the werewolf’s eyes, Marty could tell they didn’t really believe him. Maybe that’s because he is just a kid, or maybe it’s because they weren’t there on that July night when the confrontation took place. Either way, it doesn’t matter. He knew it was so.

  Tarker’s Mills is a small town, but it is spread out, and until tonight Marty has not seen a one-eyed man, and he has not dared to ask questions; his mother is already afraid that the July episode may have permanently marked him. He is afraid that if he tries any out-and-out sleuthing it will eventually get back to her. Besides—Tarker’s Mills is a small town. Sooner or later he will see the Beast with his human face on.

  Going home, Mr. Coslaw (Coach Coslaw to his thousands of students, past and present) thinks Marty is so quiet because the evening and the excitement of the evening has tired him out. In truth, this is not so. Marty has never—except on the night of the wonderful bag of fireworks—felt so awake and alive. And his principal thought is this: it had taken him almost sixty days after returning home to discover the werewolf’s identity because he, Marty, is a Catholic, and attends St. Mary’s on the outskirts of town.

  The man with the eyepatch, the man who dropped a Chunky bar into his bag and then smiled and patted him on top of his rubber head, is not a Catholic. Far from it. The Beast is the Reverend Lester Lowe, of the Grace Baptist Church.

  Leaning out the door, smiling, Marty sees the eyepatch clearly in the yellow lamplight falling through the door; it gives the mousy little Reverend an almost piratical look.

  “Sorry about your eye, Reverend Lowe,” Mr. Coslaw said in his booming Big Pal voice. “Hope it’s nothing serious?”

  The Rev. Lowe’s smile grew long-suffering. Actually, he said, he had lost the eye. A benign tumor; it had been necessary to remove the eye to get at the tumor. But it was the Lord’s will, and he was adjusting well. He had patted the top of Marty’s whole-head mask again and said that some he knew had heavier crosses to bear.

  So now Marty lies in his bed, listening to the October wind sing outside, rattling the season’s last leaves, hooting dimly through the eyeholes
of the carven pumpkins which flank the Coslaw driveway, watching the half-moon ride the starstudded sky. The question is this: What is he to do now?

  He doesn’t know, but he feels sure that in time the answer will come.

  He sleeps the deep, dreamless sleep of the very young, while outside the river of wind blows over Tarker’s Mills, washing out October and bringing in cold, star-shot November, autumn’s iron month.

  The smoking butt end of the year, November’s dark iron, has come to Tarker’s Mills. A strange exodus seems to be taking place on Main Street. The Rev. Lester Lowe watches it from the door of the Baptist Parsonage; he has just come out to get his mail and he holds six circulars and one single letter in his hand, watching the conga-line of dusty pickup trucks—Fords and Chevys and International Harvesters—snake its way out of town.

  Snow is coming, the weatherman says, but these are no riders before the storm, bound for warmer climes; you don’t head out for Florida or California’s golden shore with your hunting jacket on and your gun behind you in the cab rack and your dogs in the flatbed. This is the fourth day that the men, led by Elmer Zinneman and his brother Pete, have headed out with dogs and guns and a great many six-packs of beer. It is a fad that has caught on as the full moon approaches. Bird season’s over, deer season, too. But it’s still open season on werewolves, and most of these men, behind the mask of their grim get-the-wagons-in-a-circle faces, are having a great time. As Coach Coslaw might has said, Doodly-damn right!

  Some of the men, Rev. Lowe knows, are doing no more than skylarking; here is a chance to get out in the woods, pull beers, piss in ravines, tell jokes about polacks and frogs and niggers, shoot at squirrels and crows. They’re the real animals, Lowe thinks, his hand unconsciously going to the eyepatch he has worn since July. Somebody will shoot somebody, most likely. They’re lucky it hasn’t happened already.

  The last of the trucks drives out of sight over Tarker’s Hill, horn honking, dogs yarking and barking in the back. Yes, some of the men are just skylarking, but some—Elmer and Pete Zinneman, for example—are dead serious.

  If that creature, man or beast or whatever it is, goes hunting this month, the dogs will pick up its scent, the Rev. Lowe has heard Elmer say in the barber shop not two weeks ago. And if it—or he—don’t go out, then maybe we’ll have saved a life. Someone’s livestock at the very least.

  Yes, there are some of them—maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen—who mean business. But it is not them that has brought this strange new feeling into the back of Lowe’s brain—that sense of being brought to bay.

  It’s the notes that have done that. The notes, the longest of them only two sentences long, written in a childish, laborious hand, sometimes misspelled. He looks down at the letter that has come in today’s mail, addressed in that same childish script, addressed as the others have been addressed: The Reverend Lowe, Baptist Parsonage, Tarker’s Mills, Maine 04491.

  Now, this strange, trapped feeling . . . the way he imagines a fox must feel when it realizes that the dogs have somehow chased it into a cul-de-sac. That panicked moment that the fox turns, its teeth bared, to do battle with the dogs that will surely pull it to pieces.

  He closes the door firmly, goes inside to the parlor where the grandfather clock ticks solemn ticks and tocks solemn tocks; he sits down, puts the religious circulars carefully aside on the table Mrs. Miller polishes twice a week, and opens his new letter. Like the others, there is no salutation. Like the others, it is unsigned. Written in the center of a sheet torn from a grade-schooler’s lined notepad, is this sentence:

  Why don’t you kill yourself?

  The Rev. Lowe puts a hand to his forehead—it trembles slightly. With the other hand he crumples the sheet of paper up and puts it in the large glass ashtray in the center of the table (Rev. Lowe does all of his counselling in the parlor, and some of his troubled parishoners smoke). He takes a book of matches from his Saturday afternoon “at home” sweater and lights the note, as he has lit the others. He watches it burn.

  Lowe’s knowledge of what he is has come in two distinct stages: Following his nightmare in May, the dream in which everyone in the Old Home Sunday congregation turned into a werewolf, and following his terrible discovery of Clyde Corliss’s gutted body, he has begun to realize that something is . . . well, wrong with him. He knows no other way to put it. Something wrong. But he also knows that on some mornings, usually during the period when the moon is full, he awakes feeling amazingly good, amazingly well, amazingly strong. This feeling ebbs with the moon, and then grows again with the next moon.

  Following the dream and Corliss’s death, he has been forced to acknowledge other things, which he had, up until then, been able to ignore. Clothes that are muddy and torn. Scratches and bruises he cannot account for (but since they never hurt or ache, as ordinary scratches and bruises do, they have been easy to dismiss, to simply . . . not think about). He has even been able to ignore the traces of blood he has sometimes found on his hands . . . and lips.

  Then, on July 5th, the second stage. Simply described: he had awakened blind in one eye. As with the cuts and scratches, there had been no pain; simply a gored, blasted socket where his left eye had been. At that point the knowledge had become too great for denial: he is the werewolf; he is the Beast.

  For the last three days he has felt familiar sensations: a great restlessness, an impatience that is almost joyful, a sense of tension in his body. It is coming again—the change is almost here again. Tonight the moon will rise full, and the hunters will be out with their dogs. Well, no matter. He is smarter than they give him credit for. They speak of a man-wolf, but think only in terms of the wolf, not the man. They can drive in their pickups, and he can drive in his small Volare sedan. And this afternoon he will drive down Portland way, he thinks, and stay at some motel on the outskirts of town. And if the change comes, there will be no hunters, no dogs. They are not the ones who frighten him.

  Why don’t you kill yourself?

  The first note came early this month. It said simply:

  I know who you are.

  The second said:

  If you are a man of God, get out of town. Go someplace where there are animals for you to kill but no people.

  The third said:

  End it.

  That was all; just End it. And now

  Why don’t you kill yourself?

  Because I don’t want to, the Rev. Lowe thinks petulantly. This—whatever it is—is nothing I asked for. I wasn’t bitten by a wolf or cursed by a gypsy. It just . . . happened. I picked some flowers for the vases in the church vestry one day last November. Up by that pretty little cemetery on Sunshine Hill. I never saw such flowers before . . . and they were dead before I could get back to town. They turned black, every one. Perhaps that was when it started to happen. No reason to think so, exactly . . . but I do. And I won’t kill myself. They are the animals, not me.

  Who is writing the notes?

  He doesn’t know. The attack on Marty Coslaw has not been reported in the weekly Tarker’s Mills newspapers, and he prides himself on not listening to gossip. Also, as Marty did not know about Lowe until Halloween because their religious circles do not touch, the Rev. Lowe does not know about Marty. And he has no memory of what he does in his beast-state; only that alcoholic sense of well-being when the cycle has finished for another month, and the restlessness before.

  I am a man of God, he thinks, getting up and beginning to pace, walking faster and faster in the quiet parlor where the grandfather clock ticks solemn ticks and tocks solemn tocks. I am a man of God and I will not kill myself. I do good here, and if I sometimes do evil, why, men have done evil before me; evil also serves the will of God, or so the Book of Job teaches us; if I have been cursed from Outside, then God will bring me down in His time. All things serve the will of God . . . and who is he? Shall I make inquiries? Who was attacked on July 4th? How did I (it) lose my (its) eye? Perhaps he should be silenced . . . but not this month. Let them put their dogs b
ack in their kennels first. Yes . . .

  He begins to walk faster and faster, bent low, unaware that his beard, usually scant (he can get away with only shaving once every three days . . . at the right time of the month, that is), has now sprung out thick and scruffy and wiry, and that his one brown eye has gone a hazel shade that is deepening moment by moment toward the emerald green it will become later this night. He is hunching forward as he walks, and he has begun to talk to himself . . . but the words are growing lower and lower, more and more like growls.

  At last, as the gray November afternoon tightens down toward an early anvil-colored dusk, he bounds into the kitchen, snatches the Volare’s keys from the peg by the door, and almost runs toward the car. He drives toward Portland fast, smiling, and he does not slow when the season’s first snow starts to skirl into the beams of his headlights, dancers from the iron sky. He senses the moon somewhere above the clouds; he senses its power; his chest expands, straining the seams of his white shirt.

  He tunes the radio to a rock and roll station, and he feels just . . . great!

  And what happens later that night might be a judgment from God, or a jest of those older gods that men worshipped from the safety of stone circles on moonlit nights—oh, it’s funny, all right, pretty funny, because Lowe has gone all the way to Portland to become the Beast, and the man he ends up ripping open on that snowy November night is Milt Sturmfuller, a lifelong resident of Tarker’s Mills . . . and perhaps God is just after all, because if there is a first-class grade-A shit in Tarker’s Mills, it is Milt Sturmfuller. He has come in this night as he has on other nights, telling his battered wife Donna Lee that he is on business, but his business is a B-girl named Rita Tennison who has given him a lively case of herpes which Milt has already passed on to Donna Lee, who has never so much as looked at another man in all the years they have been married.